The New YA Royalty

Related Books:

Move over Shailene Woodley and Jennifer Lawrence because Chloë Grace Moretz is about to become the YA queen. The trailer for her adaptation of Gayle Forman’sIf I Stay just came out. Next, she will be trading tearjerkers for dystopias in an adaptation of Rick Yancey’sThe 5th Wave.

"It’s corrosive going down, you wonder if he had to add quite so much vinegar and horseradish, but afterward the effect is invigorating." Aaron Thier at The Nationreviews Rafael Chirbes' newest novel, On The Edge. The book admittedly gives no pleasure, yet is nonetheless worth reading as it operates like more of a "psychological health tonic," instead.

“He was a glutton for books who treated each text as a plate he was required to clean.” Author and critic William Gass died this week at 93, reportsThe Washington Post. The recipient of three National Book Critics Circle awards for criticism and four Pushcart prizes, Gass was awarded the PEN/Nabakov Award for lifetime achievement in 2000. See our reviews of Middle C, a novel that took Gass almost 20 years to finish, and his most recent essay collectionLife Sentences, which amply demonstrated his background as “a former philosophy professor, but more appropriately a philosopher of the word and an esthete.” We were also lucky enough to have him pen a Year in Reading entry for us back in 2009: “I miss the leisure that let me read just for fun, not to critique, or pronounce, or even to put on a list, but simply to savor,” Gass lamented. Nonetheless, he continued,“I do, from time to time, pick up old friends who never disappoint but will promise me a page or two of pleasure between art and ordinary life.”

This week, Richard Ford published his first novel in a while to feature Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of his Pulitzer-winning book The Sportswriter. At Salon, our own Lydia Kieslingposits a through-line from Bascombe to a certain TV gangster, arguing that The Sopranos shares its view of manhood with Ford’s novels. You could also read our own Michael Bourne on Ford’s 2012 book, Canada.